Agents of SHIELD 2x09 and 2x10

[psocoptera]

Ok, I like so many things they did here.

Skye shooting Ward, repeatedly, without hesitation, was glorious. Such evolution from when she wasn't willing to let him die. Don't get me wrong, I like the character and I'm glad they didn't just write him off the show, but I want him around to do things like get shot at. Also I am SO INTO his going off with a brainwashed agent stuck with Agent May's face, oh my god. Will he try to rehabilitate her, save her, free her, or is he going to use her as his own minion?

Simmons and Fitz actually talking. A little. Could watch much more of that. Specifically, they must have had time to talk while Trip went back down the hole, did they?? So many feeeeelings about that brief shot of them holding each other at the end.

I am interested and glad to see that Bobbi/Mack/Hunter actually seem to be getting a plot of their own. I have not been very into them (except Mack's relationship with Fitz) but a plot should help.

Very pleased to see Whitehall dead mid-season instead of them dragging that out to the finale and a new batch of baddies coming in! Ooh, eyeless dude is freaky. More quality good-dad-vs-bad-dad stuff with Coulson and Cal - I liked Coulson getting Cal's revenge in addition to Skye's love. (I can't believe he didn't even tell Skye her mom's name, jeez, name that character!) I was dubious about Skye being able to hold her own against 33 in a fight, who we saw May have trouble taking down, but I do like it as a sign of how much work May has done with her offscreen to pass on as much of her badassery as possible. Skye's dream with Coulson and May as her parent figures was great and I usually roll my eyes pretty hard at dream sequences. Cannot wait to see what Raina turns into (and very interested to get a bit of her backstory). I thought they played that whole thing pretty well - it's always hard when the stated aim of the good guys is to prevent the interesting plot development, because of course as the audience you really want that magic item to get the fuck activated (or whatever).

I am sad but not entirely surprised that they offed Trip - it feels like the writers have never known quite what to do with him. He's had a couple of great scenes with Coulson geeking about vintage SHIELD tech but he never seemed to have much of a character arc or particular unresolved business with anybody.

Love the Koenigs trolling everyone. Do wish they had also gotten to shoot Ward. I guess there's still time!

V. excited that a year and a half in we have a full-out superpowered superhero in the main cast. Maybe Mike Peterson will show up to give her some tips about being powered?? I really want to see how this is going to affect her relationship with Coulson, and that seems likely to be something the show will actually give us.

Also, hiatus until March: I could actually have time to write something plotty without it getting immediately jossed. HMMMM.

Comments

[q10.livejournal.com]

the way the show treats black guys as expendable is especially uncomfortable right now.

[sildra.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Like, what, is the show only allowed to have one black guy at a time? Tripp shows up and then Peterson dies soon thereafter, then Mack shows up and Tripp dies (although at least that took a bit longer)...

[q10.livejournal.com]

and the way Mack got singled out for certain unpleasantness is not helping either. especially not with the read eyes and unstoppable demonic strength, which all sounds like something Daren Wilson would describe. it's just icky, and it's trading on some tropes that the people involved should really know better than.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

This is a completely fair criticism and I'm not going to try to defend this show from charges of racist writing in these cases. I do think in this case though the Trip problem started many episodes ago when they failed to come up with a good plot arc for him, and the Mack problem is tricky because I can definitely see what (I think) they were trying to do: he was the one guy who saw that Fitz was "still in there", and for him to maybe *not* still be in there, for Fitz to have to pull a gun on him and grapple with the possibility that he has to shoot the friend/crush who had faith in him, I found that a really powerful moment. (Trip probably wouldn't be dead if he'd ever gotten more character beats like that.) This is not to say that there isn't something uncomfortable in their writing of black male characters - for me, actually, I think what makes me most uncomfortable is the coupling of the sexual objectification of black male bodies, often through the eyes of FitzSimmons - all three of Mike, Trip, and Mack get ogled - with the blowing up/burning/crumbling to ash of those same bodies, like, they can be lusted after or destroyed, but they can't actually be seen to be satisfied, victorious, heroic.

[q10.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's not that the Mack moment didn't work for me, it's just uncomfortable.

And of course a lot of these things go back some distance. The way they wrote the different newcomers and the way they decided to sign some but not others as regulars are related. The way they decided to do the casting for characters who would or wouldn't be set up for different relationships and arcs is something they had control over. It's not all a given.

I mean, it doesn't totally ruin the show for me or anything, but...

[sildra.livejournal.com]

It bothers me that Trip didn't even really get a heroic death. He was introduced as the good/black Ward, and as a love interest for Simmons. The latter completely fizzled out. The former... he was shown several times early on being really smart and fast the way a field agent is supposed to be--a suitable replacement for Ward. And then he gets under-utilized in favor of the boring white guy whose name I still haven't bothered to learn in the hopes that he won't last. (Although at least we got Bobbi as the new real super field agent replacement for Ward.) And then in the end, Trip does something heroic, yes, but he doesn't die during that, he dies due to his next action, which was an act of good-hearted but misguided futility. It's not as bad as Tara being fridged by being randomly/accidentally shot through a window, but as Whedon major-character deaths go it is relatively high on meaningless rankings. The only purpose his death served was to show that--yet again, although it had already been well established with the obelisk--that Raina and Skye are special and most other people aren't.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Hm, I disagree about the purposelessness of his death. If Trip isn't there, Raina and Skye might go through this amazing experience together and *bond* - now they're terrigen sisters! Maybe Raina was right all along! But Trip gets killed, and so Raina is squarely an antagonist, it's her fault this horrible thing happened, (also of course Skye's own fault for being in there for Trip to come after), it makes a huge difference in the character dynamics.

Of course it sucks that Trip got written off to change two other people's character dynamics. But that's the nature of the fridge.